Reddit Almost Disappears
If only.
Nobody talking about how this article seems very strongly AI-written? Like it offers things it can “do for you” at the end of each section. And the "what this means to you’ has nothing about what this means to you…
Very interesting.
i cant get any LLMs to consult reddit at this point.
Gemini seems to
Bye reddit, you were ok, 10 years ago.
Make that 12 and I’m onboard
Since when does ChatGPT provide citations?
It’s had web search ability for about 2 years now. That makes it a fair bit more reliable than before except for when the source it finds is actually irrelevant. But if you’re knowledgeable in the domain you’re prompting about, it’ll usually be easy to figure out. If you’re not… Well, good luck.
I know it had web searchability, but it never provided the source of the information, which is, like, a giant fucking problem .
All major LLMs have had citation ability for while now. Any time I ask one a question I can’t find the answer to, if it’s not providing a source, I automatically assume the output is slop. And even then, you still have to be wary, becsuse it will often make something up then cite a semi-related source that doesn’t actually contain its claims.
Surprised this fucking idiot used a source instead of strategically editing it out.
While I’m not a fan of scrapping you would think reddit would want this to push traffic to the site. Get a good answer and follow the referral link and you have a new monkey.
I think it had the opposite effect. I believe the recently didn’t renew their contract with Google because they were upset people weren’t coming to the site, just getting answers from Gemini. I could be wrong, but I thought I read that
The guys on LTT mentioned this during their Linux challenge, but I’ve found it to be true -
Scouring forums for answers to obscure errors used to take hours. Now I just throw it at Gemini, troubleshoot in real time and find the fix.
I’ve even started asking it to give me a PDF of the steps we took and filing them away for future me.
I like to ask it for a beautiful html page instead of a pdf. PDFs are a pain later on.
Tonight I spent the time spinning up a silverbullet instance and converting the PDFs to .md files. You’re right, PDFs aren’t searchable and will be a pain as the database grows.
Thanks for sharing :)
Are there any statistics on how many LLM chatbot users actually click on the source links?
That’s just for Google’s AI summaries, but it’s the only one with actual methodology disclosed I could find on a quick (non-AI) search.
Plenty of SEO mills with their own “studies” too, and the trend is similar. People don’t interact with the source sites or if they do it’s extremely seldom.
They (SEO mills) are currently trying to flip the gaslight towards “Worry not dear Webmaster, now you just have to make sure your content is now formed so it’s engaging for AI search and engage able right from the AI!” type shit.
I’m tired boss, and I’m not even generally (as in, in all aspects) anti-AI. Yet, I guess.
I mean just about every metric I’ve seen suggests most websites that see an increase in scraping see a decrease in actual human visitors. I doubt there’s much distinction between chat and search users - the goal of these services is to drop click-through rates.
Great question, I wish I knew. I know when I’m on a deep dive I will hit the links as there is other information or other articles the scrapped site has.
Imagine if the AI companies used their infinite money glitch to just replace Reddit instead. Now that’s karma.
[chuckles in fediverse]
The drop correlates with the time reddit locked down old reddit from accessing anonymously/without logging in to avoid AI scraping. Reddit themselves did this.
It’s nothing to do with that. Reddit is blocking AI searches because it’s contract with OpenAI expired last month.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but contract has nothing to do with web searches. It was about training AIs, a data-licensing deal.
I learned more here, OpenAI themselves changed how the web search works; https://www.forbes.com/sites/gabrielalinzainescu/2026/08/20/reddit-nearly-vanishes-from-chatgpt-citations-after-openai-search-change/
How much you wanna bet this lazy reporting from “promptwatch” is AI generated?
OpenAI would not have been scraping old ui?
Also most reddit content has long since been injested. No need to visit your http site anymore
They actually did use old reddit, as confirmed by reddit itself, as confirmed by massive drop after the change. It was simply far easier to scrape old reddit (pre-rendered instead of relying on JavaScript and dynamic content load)
You seem to have misunderstood, and the article you linked doesn’t contradict what I’ve said.
Wealthy, sophisticated LLM developers would not have been scraping old reddit. They would pay reddit for API access.
Shutting down old reddit closes the door on back yard developers, not OpenAI.
Additionally, when you run a prompt in a chatbot, it doesn’t scurry away and scrape old reddit and then formulate an answer. The scraping of content is going on while the model is being developed.
Even the normal Reddit site locks up after a few seconds if you’re not logged in. I’m still happy to kill time on msoutlookit while I’m at work, but follow any links to the main site and it locks you out pretty quickly. I imagine even that will be gone too soon.
only on mobile
No it’s happening to me on pc
